A Reminder Of What San Francisco Is All About

Warning: Zombietime has photographed the San Francisco part of World Naked Bike Ride 2007. It was not misadvertised, this is not a work-safe link to click to--lots of completely naked people walking around and bicycling through San Francisco. As Zombietime points out, a lot of this just an excuse for exhibitionism by the crowd that thinks bicycling is a political strategy against George Bush.

Oh, and the Trans March held on June 22, 2007 in San Francisco, also photographed by Zombietime. This isn't quite as shocking, but still not really work-safe. If you don't know what a trans march is? Well, from their website:

We are calling for this march to demonstrate that we are a significant and growing portion of the lgbtiq community; to increase our visibility and presence in the tgiqlb community and the overall community at large; to encourage more trans and gender-variant people to come out; to build connections among ftm, mtf, bayot, crossdressers, sadhin, hijra, transvestites, bantut, drag queens, drag kings, mahu, transsexuals, bakla, travesti, genderqueers, kathoey, two spirit, intersex and those with other labels for themselves and no labels for themselves, those who see gender as having more than two options, and those who live between the existing options; to support one another as a community, through all of our struggles; to speak out against violence, hate, transphobia, and the oppression of any and all of us under the existing social structure; and to be fabulous and powerful in the company of others that are fabulous and powerful.

If most of this looks like gobbledygook or typographical errors, that's because you don't keep up on the rapidly enlarging community of the hopelessly weird. There used to be "lgb" which means "lesbian, gay, and bisexual." Then it morphed into "lgbt" which included transgendered sorts.

Somewhere the "q" got added in for those people who are proud and loud about being "queer." Queer? Isn't that an insult? Oh no. This is a crowd that thinks that most homosexuals are too heteronormative in their behavior--meaning that many homosexual men act like men, and many homosexual women act like women. The self-defined queers revel in acting like the nasty stereotypes of homosexuals. For men, simpering, mincing, effeminate, and histronic--really, acting like an exaggeration of a 13 year old girl that hasn't grown up. For women, the bull dyke stereotype of a blue collar beer belching man.

What about the "i" in "lbtiq" above? Heck if I know. Interspecies, perhaps?

If homosexuals were really just like straight people, "except for who they love," they wouldn't be forming common cause with this bunch of kooks, sickos, and exhibitionists. The more I lived in the Bay Area, the more I saw of this emerging sickness, and the more persuaded I was to take a serious look at the available research about homosexuality--and the more obvious it was that this is not an alternative lifestyle.

Reasons To Be Careful

Regular readers know that I support the right to be armed for self-defense. I run the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog where my co-bloggers and me link to news stories of American civilians (not police officers) defend themselves with guns. Most of the time, these are incidents where it is hard to get too heart-broken about the death of the criminal. Incidents like this one. Or this one. Or this one.

There have been other incidents over the years where the shooter was legally in the right, because the shooter had good reason to fear death or great bodily injury, but you still shake your head that someone had to die over such a stupid argument. These aren't terribly common, but they do happen, and we report them.

And there are some incidents (and I emphasize "some" because they aren't very common) that happen that are a reminder that living in fear--even when that fear is completely justified--can have tragic results. Here's one of those cases. My co-blogger Pete linked to this story from the August 5, 2007 San Antonio Express-News:

After realizing that his home had an intruder, a homeowner chased down a 19-year-old man and shot him to death on the Northwest Side early Saturday, according to a police report.
Raymond Lemes, 48, said he was asleep when he heard a scream.
Lemes grabbed his gun and realized an intruder, later identified as Tracy Glass, was in his home in the 9800 block of Autumn Star.
Glass took off and Lemes chased him down the street. When he caught up to the suspect, Lemes said Glass took a swing at him so he shot the man.
When police arrived at 2:35 a.m., they found Glass facedown, dead with gunshot wounds to the chest, neck and arm.
The homeowner had a license for his .40 caliber Glock pistol, a police report said.
He told police Glass probably had gained access to his home through a sliding door that had been broken for some time.

A friend of Glass contacted me, quite irate, insisting that Glass was visiting his sister in San Antonio, went out for a walk, and got confused about which house was his sister's place. This is not an absurd possibility. I've seen a few news stories over the years where someone gets shot entering the wrong house at night by mistake--but usually, such a person is riproaring drunk. Most people get halfway in the door before they realize that they are in the wrong place.

That Lemes's house had a door with a broken lock at first sounds implausible--but I recently discovered that the slider on my house (which is less than two years old) had a lock that was no longer working. I discovered it only because we were going on a trip.

Lemes certainly did not need to chase Glass down the street, gun in hand. It was lawful to do so. Armed pursuit of a fleeing felon, and even use of deadly force by a civilian is lawful. But it was not particularly wise--and Lemes is certainly going to be fighting a civil suit over this fateful decision. It is conceivable that Lemes may still face criminal charges.

Lemes claimed that Glass took a swing at him, and that he fired out of fear for his life. This news account suggests that the bullet wounds were all in the front of the body--which at least makes Lemes' claim that he was engaged in self-defense plausible.

I will be curious to know if the autopsy on Glass shows intoxicants in his system. This is by far the most likely explanation for both the mistaken entry into the wrong house and Glass' apparent aggressive actions against Lemes. Even if that turns out to be the case, this was a tragedy, one that will cause Lemes enormous difficulties for years.

If Lemes had shot Glass inside Lemes' home, this wouldn't even be under discussion. Glass' mistaken entry at night would have been recognized as a tragedy, but there would be no question about Lemes being in the right. The pursuit of Glass outside was at least a big mistake.

What? You Aren't Pro-Choice?

You may be aware of the Duggars, an Arkansas family, who just had their 17th child. I confess that the accounts that I read of them sounds a bit odd--giving every child a first name that starts with a "J"--but as I (and others) have pointed out before, demography is destiny. Evangelical Christians like the Duggars having children means that their culture will survive into the next generation.

If you want to see how tremendously hate-filled the left is, read the comments on the news story in the August 3, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle, here. Over here, however, is a pro-choicer who admits after thinking about it for a while:

Reproductive rights go both ways. It's HER uterus. PERIOD. She can do whatever she wants with it, and until my taxes start paying for her child-rearing, I should have a nice cup of [colorful expression deleted] and tend to my own business. As far as I can tell, these folks are not on welfare or any type of government aid. The kids are home-schooled, so they're not clogging the public school system. They're living in a 7000 square-foot home, not holed up in a log cabin in the Ozarks, inbreeding and plotting a government overthrow, or refusing to pay their taxes. The kids are well-nourished and well-dressed. We're not hearing about the girls being married off to cousins, or sold into prostitution. The boys aren't being arrested for hate crimes, drug trafficking, or gang activity.

So, you know what? Live and let live.

It is a rather interesting question, isn't it? Do pro-choicers really mean it when they say they are "pro-choice"? I'm afraid that a lot of the crowd you see commenting at the San Francisco Chronicle website are just pro-abortion, and anti-children.

UPDATE: Adam Graham has a roundup of liberal reactions to the Duggars. So much for tolerance!

The Roeaux Effect

Considerettes points to how leftists moving to Canada could change American politics:

James Taranto has given a name to the idea that the country is getting more and more anti-abortion partially due to abortion being legal. Calling it “The Roe Effect”, it postulates that since those who favor legal abortion are more likely to get one, and assuming children generally follow the political leanings of their parents, more abortion foes are being born than abortion advocates, and thus over time support for legal abortion will dwindle. (See the Wikipedia entry for links to other articles on this.)
After the Roe decision, it would take at least 18 years for the effect to start being seen, when the post-Roe kids were of voting age. However, there’s another trend occurring that may have an effect on American politics without the waiting period.

Considerettes calls this loss of American leftists to Canada the Roeaux Effect as a clever pun on "Roe" with a French Canadian accent! Good points, but unfortunately, some of these American emigres are keeping their American citizenship--and I presume will continue to vote leftist, and send huge quantities of money to support leftist causes.

Lunatic Fringes

Zombietime has a very interesting investigative report pointing out that the literature and slogans of neo-Nazi literature being distributed in the Bay Area is astonishingly similar to the leftist antiwar protest stuff:

The question that nags at me is this:

Why did the media fail to describe the "anti-Semitic" literature distributed by W.A.R. in Berkeley? The reporters surely saw the material, as most of the other flyers and publications were described in the various news reports. Of them all, it seems only that one was left unmentioned.

Was this not a random oversight, but instead a conscious or subconscious decision? One wonders if the reporters, upon seeing the anti-Israel flyer and perhaps realizing that its sentiment was identical to the sentiment of the anti-war movement, decided to just sweep that particular detail under the rug.

All the reports mention the fact that there was anti-Semitic material found, and it was decried and condemned by the various people quoted in the article. But then why -- when the exact same messages are displayed at left-wing rallies -- does the media not produce news reports exposing the anti-Semitism of the "peace movement"?

This isn't really much of a surprise. Neo-Nazi groups, as much as they and the left like to describe them as "far right" really aren't. If you've read The Turner Diaries, you may have been struck--as I was--by how much of neo-Nazi doctrine really is "national socialist." For example, in The Turner Diaries, Hispanics (even naturalized and native-born U.S. citizens) are deported so that their jobs can go to poor, unskilled whites.

How To Reduce Greenhouse Gases...Raise the Speed Limit!

At least, that's what One Hand Clapping suggests here. He points out that for many trips, it makes more sense to drive than to fly if your primary concern is carbon dioxide production. But it takes a long time to drive at 65 or 75 mph, compared to flying.

This last weekend, my wife and I drove to Rexburg, Idaho--which was about a five hour drive. Speed limits on I-84 for most of the distance we drove are 75 mph. I actually set the cruise control at 82 mph for most of the trip to Rexburg, and coming back, I set the cruise control at 90 mph. While we passed a lot of trucks, I would say that based on the cars that we passed or that passed us, our speed was about 65th or 70th percentile. We passed more cars than passed us, but not dramatically so.

On much of I-84, in daylight, you can set the speed limit at perhaps 100 mph, and I doubt that it would make much of a difference in accident or death rates. This would cut at least an hour off the drive--perhaps more--and make me less tempted to fly the next time we go to Rexburg.

But is it safe? Unlike a lot of the other highways, I-84 is fenced, so there's almost no wildlife (and no livestock) crossing the road. I-84 is also a controlled access road, so you don't have the vehicles pulling onto the highway, either.

The one area where I would be a bit concerned about raising the speed limit would be tires. I believe most passenger car tires sold in the U.S. now are S-speed rated (intended for unlimited use at 113 mph), but there are a lot of people out there who don't check their tire pressures, ever. A tire that is perfectly safe at 100 mph when properly inflated can suffer catastrophic failure if it is severely underinflated.

Someone's PR Firm Did A Great Job

Kyle Cassidy published a book this year titled Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes. Unfortunately, it is very similar in title to my book Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie.

Cassidy's book is coffee table book of pictures of American gun owners. My book is a serious piece of historical research. So do a Google search for "Armed America" and you will see that whoever his PR firm is did a much better job of getting press for it. Or maybe I need to write books with lots of pretty pictures, and not so many words.